NW_Pilot's Trans-Atlantic Flight -- All the scary details...

"NW_Pilot" wrote in message
...


Yea, its a scary thought! The G1,000 System is nice when it works "Great
IFR platform for situational awareness" But they do need some manual back
up of some critical items for safe IFR flight. I know I would not fly into
IFR conditions in a G1000 equipped airplane with my family or a passenger
on board. After sitting for 70 hours on Cessna version of the G1000 Scares
the hell out of me and it takes a lot to scare me! To many bugs and
failure in 70 hours of flight! Look at my finial day the Tach. even
failed!



I think you did good. This whole adventure and your handling of it has IMHO
wiped away the stain on your reputation that was the 150 roll.

NW_Pilot schrieb:

Yea, its a scary thought! The G1,000 System is nice when it works "Great IFR
platform for situational awareness" But they do need some manual back up of
some critical items for safe IFR flight. I know I would not fly into IFR
conditions in a G1000 equipped airplane with my family or a passenger on

Not that I want to excuse those system failures the least bit, and not
that I would not have an adrenaline rush in that situation, but there
*are* manual back ups for the critical items! At least in those planes
I've seen so far, there has always been a "steam" AI, a "steam" ASI, a
"steam" altimeter and a whisky compass. You can perfectly fly in IMC
with this equipment.

Look at my finial day the Tach. even failed!

Hardly a critical item.

Stefan

"NW_Pilot" wrote in message
. ..

"Allen" wrote in message
. ..

"Jose" wrote in message
m...
The aux tank was connected directly to the engine after the aircraft
fuel system, Not to the wing and the provided documentation and system
description mentioned nothing about the fuel return to the main tanks.

How would the fuel get to the main tanks in the first place? Is the
engine the only connection? (if so, with the fuel selector OFF that
should block fuel flow to the main tanks). Is there a vent line that
connects them?

Excess fuel from the engine is returned to the main tanks. Twin Cessna's
are the same way; if you switch to the aux tanks before burning a certain
amount out of the mains (90 minutes for the large aux tanks) the mains
will overfill and vent overboard before the aux tanks are empty.

Allen


And there is a note in the description of that fuel system that explains
that! Which was not included in the description of the modified fuel
system on the 172.

That is true, I am not inferring anything. You would think the tank company
would be familiar enough with the aircraft they are installing tanks into to
have a working (correct) procedure manual. Surely you are not the first to
ferry this particular combination.

Allen

On Mon, 02 Oct 2006 19:23:12 GMT, Jose
wrote in :


Is this dumb, or is there a good reason not to return fuel to the tank
whence it came, in this case, the ferry tank?

I suppose it was an engineering expedient to simplify the
installation.

"Andrey Serbinenko" wrote in message
...
A few years ago, I remember reading an excellent book on general design of
modern avionics. In particular, one thing that I believe is different
between
Garmin's baby and what they have in B-s and A-s is redundancy. The whole
thing
there is doubled, and some critical components are tripled. And then
there's
a whole body of software that takes care of voting-elimination among
inputs.
By design, the event of the computer reboot (i.e. all three redundant
computers
reboot) is perhaps as likely as the event of all four engines quitting at
the
same time. What surprises me is that Garmin got FAA approval for such a
system,
whereas it doesn't even come close to what "normal" glass cockpit is
supposed
to be like in terms of robustness of system design. I understand it's all
done
in the name of affordability, but this is clearly a dangerous game to
play.

If you think about it, just to be able to claim any kind of "robustness",
you should be reasonably sure that there's no single failure that will
take
the whole system out, right? And there we go: excessive fuel venting took
airspeed indicator out completely, and CO indication out completely. And
this
is aside from any software bugs; this is the way G1000 is supposed to work
by design!

So, I guess my point is: you can't just take a steam-gauge-type airplane,
replace all the individual *independent* instrument systems with one
electronic box, and claim you've got an equally reliable plane. No way. By
tying everything together and establishing inter-system dependencies that
never existed before, you increase your likelihood of a catastrophic
failure
by orders of magnitude. If you want to use an all-in-one instrument
system,
you need to redesign the airplane and fit it with redundant systems to
compensate for that loss of overall reliability.

The G1000 system If you buy one or intend to fly one in the Soup be current
and really proficient on you partial panel skill because in the event of a
G1000 failure or even partial failure you will be left with and Compass,
Altimeter, Attitude Indicator, and Airspeed Indicator and a bunch of useless
knobs and buttons or questionable reading from a partial failure. It's
almost an IFR pilots worst nightmare yea a Vacuum and Electrical System
Failure as when the G1000 goes radios, navigation, & transponder go along
with it!

I don't think it would cost Cessna much $$$ to put some manual back up
instruments in the panel even if they are the small ones they already charge
to much for a skyhawk why not add 3k or 4k if even that much to the price
and add some redundancy to the system!

Recently, Jose posted:

The FI system has a fuel return line to
return unused fuel pumped to the engine back to the wing tank(s).

Is this dumb, or is there a good reason not to return fuel to the tank
whence it came, in this case, the ferry tank?

I think it's short-sighted, as it didn't consider the entire fuel system.
From the description that NW_Pilot gave, the aux fuel system seems more
like a kludge than something that was designed.

Neil

On 02 Oct 2006 19:26:50 GMT, Andrey Serbinenko
wrote in
:

So, I guess my point is: you can't just take a steam-gauge-type airplane,
replace all the individual *independent* instrument systems with one
electronic box, and claim you've got an equally reliable plane. No way.

Obviously you are not a member of the Cessna marketing team. :-)

Thanks for the link to the book. If I knew the appropriate
individuals at Garmin and Cessna to send it to, I would.

On Mon, 02 Oct 2006 19:32:15 GMT, "Allen"
wrote in :

Twin Cessna's
are the same way; if you switch to the aux tanks before burning a certain
amount out of the mains (90 minutes for the large aux tanks) the mains will
overfill and vent overboard before the aux tanks are empty.

Are you saying that Cessna designed the fuel system that way, and the
FAA certified it? Or are you referring to a ferry tank?

It makes you wonder if the FAA would certify kinking the fuel line
instead of providing a valve to shut off fuel flow. :-)

On Mon, 2 Oct 2006 12:47:44 -0700, "NW_Pilot"
wrote in
:

After sitting for 70 hours on Cessna version of the G1000 Scares the
hell out of me and it takes a lot to scare me! To many bugs and failure in
70 hours of flight! Look at my finial day the Tach. even failed!

Was that a mechanical tach?

I would write a report of your experience detailing the equipment
failures that occurred, and politely and respectfully send copies to
Cessna and Garmin. If you word it, so that it contains implicit
references to their exposure to civil liability, and express your
disappointment with the performance of their products, who knows how
they may respond. They may try to appease you with a perk or two. If
not, forward the report to AOPA, FSDO, and AvWeb. :-)

"Stefan" wrote in message
...
NW_Pilot schrieb:

Yea, its a scary thought! The G1,000 System is nice when it works "Great
IFR platform for situational awareness" But they do need some manual back
up of some critical items for safe IFR flight. I know I would not fly
into IFR conditions in a G1000 equipped airplane with my family or a
passenger on

Not that I want to excuse those system failures the least bit, and not
that I would not have an adrenaline rush in that situation, but there
*are* manual back ups for the critical items! At least in those planes
I've seen so far, there has always been a "steam" AI, a "steam" ASI, a
"steam" altimeter and a whisky compass. You can perfectly fly in IMC with
this equipment.

Look at my finial day the Tach. even failed!

Hardly a critical item.

Stefan

I would not say perfectly you can hold straight and level and do climbs and
descents but without a reliable source of navigation except for a compass
(which has it's errors) and the deviations in Greenland area can be as much
as 40 degrees then add the wind correction makes for challenging navigation
for a few hundred miles with only a compass. Now when the only approach you
have is an NDB and the indicator don't work hahahaha!!! Trust me you don't
want to be there it's not fun but, it is a rush up until the moment you turn
on your portable gps and it downloads your present position and draws a line
to the nearest airport 200+ miles away!